


Sounds Like

by CiderApples



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Catharsis, Fix-It, M/M, Post-Episode: s15e18 Despair, and no super hell either, just nobody, just pure wrenching catharsis, nobody's dying ok?, thats what im here for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:46:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27425929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CiderApples/pseuds/CiderApples
Summary: So maybe Dean's busted inside.Maybe he's a wall of lead bricks with a shell of toxic masculinity underneath.But there's a man in there that Cas sees, and Sam sees, and everybody sees, and that man wouldn't leave Cas hanging.Not afterthat.[Post-ep fix-it for "Despair."]
Relationships: Castiel & Dean Winchester, Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 20
Kudos: 404





	Sounds Like

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Look, Dean and Cas made it out of there alive, okay?  
> I don't care how they made it. Not important.  
> They made it; go with it; here we are.

Something had happened at the bunker. What, exactly, Sam didn’t know. But Dean and Cas had gotten themselves clear of it, and that was all the information he needed at the moment.

He’d straggled back into the bunker just in time to witness Cas, arm twisted over Dean’s shoulder, being pulled — or was he doing the pulling? — toward the dormitory hall. Both of them were in tatters, shredded, though anything that grace could cure had been wiped clean. No gashes remained to match the blood that soaked their shirts. Still, they were shaky on their feet and in their fingers. Sam could see the tips of Cas’s hair and the edges of Dean’s shirtsleeves quivering. And Cas’s wings were out — which, weirdly, was the _second_ thing Sam noticed, after the fact that Dean was tied to Cas like a Celtic knot.

The wings were in bad shape. Not just dirty, but demolished. They dragged behind Cas like a tarp full of snapped branches.

Sam had questions, but they could wait. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt so goddamned close to deceased. He staggered down the hall with an almost rudely curt “you ok?” spoken sideways, as he passed them. Dean gave him a nod, looking as fucked as Sam felt. 

“W’re good,” he gruffed, like a handful of shredded wheat was stuck in his windpipe. “You?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. 

No knowing pause followed. Not tonight. Sam stumbled the rest of the way to his door, racing nausea, and foundered into the dark sanctuary of his room. The door shut tightly. His bed received him with a familiar laxity, and for once he was grateful, almost to tears, for the shittiness of the springs, the folding of the mattress around him like a dusty, mouldering chrysalis. Still strung up on the tenterhooks of adrenaline, he laid there with his eyes half-open, staring into the dark, as bunker sounds plucked one by one out of the quiet.

Pipes hissing. 

Metal settling.

Vents hitting loose sheets of paper at just the right angle.

And then, from down the hall, the sounds of Dean.

* * *

You’d think that, over the years, Sam would have learned to listen less.

You’d think he would have found some way to block anything that came from Dean’s room, Dean’s side of the bed, or the corner of the hotel room (late at night, after dad got back). Shouldn’t he have adapted by now? Developed some genetic warp that let his ears seal up like a diving suit if so much as a whisper from Dean’s half of things drifted over the border?

He hadn’t.

He’d been listening for so long, now; what would be the point? Their lifestyle — two huge people in perennially confined spaces — made it unavoidable. Besides, Dean’s sounds were so familiar, they were practically white noise. Or static. No, wait — not static: more like _weather_. Dean’s weather.

Having experienced it for so long, Sam had found the patterns. Developed forecasts. He could tell what time of day it was from the scritch of Dean’s hand on his chin. Sam could tell nearly as much about Dean by sound as a dog could, by smell.

He knew Dean’s footsteps, for example. All of them. Tired, hungry, drunk. How Dean scraped without caffeine, and went flat-footed when sore after a fight. He was inaudible on carpet (no surprise there; John had made silence a game since forever). His feet, when wet, were so soft as to disappear; dry, they were callused, and clicked like beetles over leaves.

He knew Dean’s breaths, chews, snores, farts, sneezes, and laughs by heart. He could tell Dean's lies from his half-lies, Dean's half-truths from his full-truths. Lately, the sample size of full-truths had run low, but Sam could still tell the wheat from the chaff. There was a grating, gritty quality to Dean’s truths, like they burned him coming up.

There were sounds Sam knew that he wished he didn’t. Squishes, squelches, slaps. The sound of sex for money, and sex for free. A man behind the bar. A man behind the hotel. Women absolutely everywhere. Fake moans. (Were they all fake? Because when Dean got off by himself, he might as well have been dead.) Dirty talk, pet names, murmurs of approval: all different, every time. It was weird, wasn’t it? That Dean didn’t have a default? He seemed to manufacture the whole thing from scratch every time, from pitch to act to vocabulary. It was weird to Sam that he still didn't know — not that he _should_ know, but after all this observation, _shouldn’t_ he? — what Dean _liked_. 

And then there was another category of unwanted sounds. The sounds of too many things against Dean’s skin. A flat hand. An open palm. A near miss, a landed punch. Knuckle on bone, knuckle on meat. The belt. The buckle. The shocked, breathless aftermath of John chewing his little heart out on some hotel sidewalk. The hitch of a nightmare sigh. The turn of pages while he waited out the night, wide awake. 

At this point, there were very few sounds Sam _hadn’t_ heard Dean make. 

Crying, he guessed, was one. 

He’d never heard Dean cry. Which was not to say he hadn’t known when Dean was crying. Dean didn’t cry infrequently; he just did it in absolute, unwavering silence. The actual sound of it was a shimmery rustle of bedsheets (too fast and shallow in rhythm to be the _other_ bedsheet-rustling sound), or the uneven rasp of a risky breath. It was a tissue being pulled from a cheap box in the dark, mashed once against each eye and then shoved up his nose. Sometimes, rarely (and only if Dean were in another room, feeling safe and masked behind the rattle of a bathroom fan or the highway’s hum), there would be a hack, a bark, some throat-clearing sound. From another person, in another world, it might be a shower singer readying the pipes. 

Wasn’t, though.

Sam would know. 

He knew it all, pretty much.

Except...tonight, from Dean's room at the other end of the hall, for the first time in a long time, Sam was hearing something new.

It wasn’t Cas, though the angel was down there in Dean's room, keeping company. Cas's noises weren't as familiar as Dean's (Cas didn't make much noise, in general), but Sam could tell them apart instantly. This belonged to Dean, one-hundred-percent. A wretched, rhythmic gagging. (If there were a way other than ‘gagging’ to contextualize it, Sam would.) It sounded like Cas was dropping Dean over and over again from a great height, like a seagull trying to crack a shell. And Dean was the shell, but also the seagull, and this soft thing inside him was opening _from_ him but also _for_ him, oozing in a surprising and defenseless way from its prison.

Maybe the shell had gotten too small. 

Was this a liberation? 

If it was, it was a painful one. With Dean, things often had to be. He’d never been one to go willingly toward his own salvation.

Still; even if unwillingly rent from his mouth, the sounds were strikingly uncharacteristic of Dean. Very un-Dean-y. _So_ un-Dean-y as to be fascinating to Sam, who couldn’t figure out how they were cutting loose of his brother. How had Dean’s traps been sprung, all million different bars and locks and gates? Was it Cas’s magic? A fist fight? Fucking sorcery? He didn’t know. He did know that whatever it was, it would end in an instant if Dean realized he could be overheard — or, really, perceived at all, at any level of existence. Sam was determined not to be the reason for that. When push came to shove, he peed in an empty bottle instead of tiptoeing down the hall to the bathroom, just in case. 

The strange new soundscape continued on, slowly and surely.

And slowly,

surely,

it turned into something else.

Hitchy. Wispy. It started flowing in little breaks of breath, like waves on a beach. Words unknowable, too soft. 

Then a humming, a bleating, bleeding out through tightly-pressed lips that couldn’t keep it in: a jaw wired shut by shame, or duty, or one of Dean’s other usual reasons for being. On its heels came a strange, high, pain sound, then another. A shocked sound, surprised, dismayed. It quivered and fell, quivered and fell, like Jell-O down steep stairs, and Sam realized — with a feeling like having swallowed a too-big ice cube — that Dean was sobbing. Not _crying_ — not like any of the varieties of Dean’s crying that had ever existed — but big, racking, sobs in which Sam couldn’t hear a spot for Dean to breathe. It made Sam forget to breathe, too.

And then this, too, fell to waste like a sandcastle in the tide. What swelled in its wake was a poorly constructed whisper, supposed to be quiet and close, but Dean’s timbre colored too far outside the lines for that. It quavered. It went louder and softer, volume not really under Dean’s tight control, but clearly none of this was.

Sam had to clench his jaw against the threat of a hiccup. His chest had started vibrating. When? His muscles twitched between his shoulders as if he were freezing to death, for no good reason at all. He shoveled his chin down through the mass of his pillow. _Dean,_ his mind went. _Dean, Dean, Dean_. Not with any _will_ , not with any _intention_ , but because his heart was mewling _Dean, Dean, Dean,_ up his throat, like a child.

Then Sam heard Cas for the first time since he and Dean had gone into the bedroom together. Cas was hard to hear. His holy-gravel voice blended too well into the mechanicals, the furnace, the fridge, and sometimes Sam wondered if he only spoke out loud when they were all together. Ever since Cas had left his mark on Dean, it felt like half of what he said was silent, and beamed directly into Dean’s head.

Sam heard this, though.

He couldn’t pick out the words, but the tone was small and silencing — silencing not to Dean, whose litany proceeded unchecked, but to every other sound on earth. The blood in Sam’s ears, the electricity in the walls, the buzz of the hallway lights. The voice of heaven put a damper on the world, and in the sudden anechoic smother, Dean’s words jumped out at him in neon, flashing. They weren’t for Sam, but Sam jumped on them like a mine. He stole them, jammed them into his heart and forced them to settle there. They made peace: peace with the other sounds, the hurt sounds and pain sounds and the lack of happier sounds that Sam had wanted his whole life to be able to fix and hadn’t been able to come close.

Well.

It didn’t have to be him that fixed things, did it?

A cool spot poked up at Sam’s cheek from his pillow, about the size of a tear.

Down the hall, Cas murmured more, faintly. It passed through Sam and the bunker (and the world, maybe) like an electrical field, blue and cool. He felt himself being put to sleep, Dean still wauling softly in the background, and realized that Dean’s sounds were going to play him out of consciousness. As they always did. Always had. Their whole life. Because Dean went last, once everyone else had gotten through. 

Though maybe…

Maybe not anymore. 

Sam closed his eyes into a saturation of Dean’s lullaby: Dean’s mouth in perpetual motion three rooms away, shaping _I love you, I love you, I love you,_ over and over and over into Cas’s embrace like they were the only words he knew.

It sounded, to Sam, like the truth.


End file.
